Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood: Faith, Family, and Absurdity

Patricia Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, “Priestdaddy,” is a riotous, deeply intelligent, and often startlingly tender exploration of family, faith, and the peculiar absurdities of modern life. With a poet’s precision and a stand-up comedian’s timing, Lockwood invites readers into the chaotic embrace of her anachronistic family, headed by a man who is both a Catholic priest and a larger-than-life patriarch. The book is more than just a collection of eccentric anecdotes; it is a profound meditation on the spaces where the sacred and the profane collide, where the body and the spirit grapple, and where love, in its most unconventional forms, endures.

The Unconventional Patriarch: Father Greg Lockwood

At the heart of “Priestdaddy” is the titular figure: Father Greg Lockwood. A man of booming pronouncements, questionable jokes, and an unshakeable, if idiosyncratic, faith, he is a walking contradiction. Permitted to be a priest despite being married with children due to a special dispensation (he converted from Lutheranism, where he was already ordained and married), Father Lockwood embodies a rare loophole in Catholic doctrine. His presence – often shirtless, prone to shredding electric guitar, and delivering sermons with the same gusto he uses for off-color remarks – sets the stage for the book’s central tension. Lockwood navigates her relationship with him, and by extension, with the Church he represents, with a mixture of filial affection, exasperation, and sharp-eyed critique. She neither wholly condemns nor entirely embraces his world, instead choosing to observe and articulate its inherent strangeness and surprising beauty.

Return to the Rectory: A Crucible of Personalities

The memoir gains its narrative momentum when Patricia and her husband, Jason, facing financial hardship, move back into her parents’ rectory in Kansas City. This return to the nest forces a confrontation with the past and a re-immersion into the family’s unique ecosystem. Lockwood’s mother, a woman of fierce anxieties and equally fierce love, provides a grounding counterpoint to her husband’s flamboyance. The household is a crucible of conflicting beliefs and personalities, where discussions about theology can seamlessly morph into arguments about household chores, and where moments of profound spiritual reflection are often punctuated by the mundane or the bizarre.

A Singular Prose Style: Literary Meets Vernacular

Lockwood’s prose is a singular achievement. It is at once highly literary and deeply colloquial, capable of soaring to poetic heights before plunging into the vernacular of the internet, a space she navigates with equal fluency (having first gained notoriety as a “poet laureate of Twitter”). This stylistic agility allows her to capture the multifaceted nature of her experience. She can describe a theological concept with intellectual rigor and then, in the next breath, offer a hilariously scatological observation. This blending of high and low culture, of the sacred and the scatological, is not merely for shock value; it reflects a worldview that sees the divine in the everyday, the profound in the seemingly trivial.

Navigating Faith, Doubt, and Meaning

Beyond the family dynamics, “Priestdaddy” delves into broader themes of faith and doubt, the body and its vulnerabilities, and the search for meaning in a world saturated with irony. Lockwood, having experienced a crisis of faith in her youth, approaches religious themes with both skepticism and a lingering sense of wonder. Her father’s unwavering, almost childlike belief system is both a source of bafflement and a strange comfort. The book doesn’t offer easy answers about God or religion, but rather explores the human need for belief and the myriad, often messy, ways it manifests.

The Unflinching Exploration of the Corporeal

Furthermore, Lockwood’s exploration of the body is unflinching. From her father’s physical eccentricities to her own health concerns, the memoir is grounded in the corporeal. This focus is significant, particularly within the context of Catholicism, a faith that places great emphasis on the body of Christ and the physical sacraments. Lockwood reclaims the body from purely theological discourse, presenting it as a site of humor, pain, pleasure, and, ultimately, human connection.

Conclusion: An Unforgettable Tapestry of Humanity

In “Priestdaddy,” Patricia Lockwood has crafted a memoir that is as unconventional and unforgettable as the family it portrays. It is a book that makes you laugh until you cry, and then makes you think, deeply, about the complexities of love, belief, and the sheer, bewildering experience of being human. By embracing the contradictions of her upbringing, Lockwood offers a refreshingly honest and uniquely modern perspective on the enduring power of family and the endless, often absurd, quest for grace.